Edmonton Oilers stagger with sick Connor McDavid out of the lineup

DALLAS — The best hockey player on the planet was in the house Monday night, but it was Connor McDavid’s dad Brian wearing his son’s No. 97 jersey in the stands as part of the Edmonton Oilers’ fathers trip.

No No. 97 on the ice, unfortunately for the Oilers, the dads and the fans at the American Airlines Center.

Pops looked good in the sweater, but his son would have looked better, no surprise there.

Connor McDavid is not only the National Hockey League’s marquee star, he’s human. He gets sick.

So he missed his first game with the flu after 222 straight appearances in regular-season play, including last season when he didn’t let on that he was dragging his body around the rinks, losing 15 pounds and not because he was sick and tired of dragging around checkers who didn’t get penalties.

But this time, McDavid was a not-very-healthy scratch, on the plane to St. Louis for the Oilers next stop, wearing a dark suit and an ashen face. The Oilers certainly could have used him in their 4-1 setback to the host Dallas Stars on Monday, but then again, that would be taking away from the strong work of Leon Draisaitl, who took the No. 1 centre spot and played 25-1/2 minutes while double-shifted, as was Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who got close to 24 minutes at pivot.

“I didn’t know if he (McDavid) was going to play or not. Came to the rink and he wasn’t ready to go,” said Draisaitl, who sloughed off the Oilers’ lines, which were mixed up minus without McDavid and fourth-line centre Ryan Spooner, who is also sick.

Draisaitl wasn’t happy that he didn’t score on a 2-on-1 when the game was 1-0. He looked off Alex Chiasson and Anton Khudobin got his pad out. “I should have made a better play,” he said.

Not every team has Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins as fall-backs without McDavid, of course..

“Yeah, I guess it’s a good problem to have when a team has a lot of centres. Obviously, Jujhar (Khaira) can step in and Kyle (Brodziak) if we need them (for bigger minutes). But I thought we responded without Connor and Spooner,” said Nugent-Hopkins.

Draisaitl and Nugent-Hopkins are good, but they also need somebody to pass to. The Oilers are not exactly flush with wingers who can score outside of Alex Chiasson, who has 11 goals so far, and Drake Caggiula, who has seven. So, they got one past Stars goalie Anton Khudobin.

For the most part, it was one-and-done. Khudobin would make a nice save, and there was no one available to exploit a rebound.

Then again, the Oilers don’t score enough even when McDavid is playing. While they’ve scored just 14 times in seven games for Ken Hitchcock, they scored just 57 goals in 20 games for former coach Todd McLellan. The Oilers have just 50 goals 5-on-5 all year.

They need a winger like, let’s see, Jeff Skinner, the Buffalo Sabres’ leading goal-scorer (20 of them) who was available this summer for chump change in a trade, as it turned out, but the Oilers were bumped up against the cap and couldn’t afford him. And they need a good puck-moving defenceman, but when haven’t they?

Two huge holes that aren’t getting filled right now.

Back to the present.

“You move on … really, you have to be able to win games if you’re missing one (premier) guy,” Oilers head coach Ken Hitchcock said following Monday’s loss minus McDavid and Spooner in the lineup. “It’s not the end of the world. We’re lucky because we’ve got Leon and Nuge. They were really good for us in the game today.”

And truth is the Oilers had the will even if they were missing the skill, for 40 minutes anyway. The Stars had just four shots in the first 20 minutes — none by top-liners Jamie Benn, Tyler Seguin or Alex Radulov — but they led 1-0 after the first period. Then Brett Ritchie, a healthy scratch for five straight games and seven of the past eight, got a gift to make it 2-0 early in the third — a whiffed pass from Mattias Janmark found its way to his stick just as Janmark’s fan got to Jason Dickinson in the first.

Really, you have to be able to win games if you’re missing one (premier) guy.

Ken Hitchcock

Oilers defenceman Darnell Nurse was over in the corner with partner Chris Wideman, leaving Dickinson all alone on the first goal, and Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson got mixed up on the second one. They were preventable goals, even if they were strange ones.

“When they got their second, we dropped a bit, but we had played a helluva game for almost 40 minutes … then again, you’re not winning games with one goal on the road,” said Hitchcock, who got 14 shots from his back-end but only 15 from his 11 healthy forwards.

“We were solid for two periods, but after their second one, our heads sunk,” said Draisaitl, whose ice-time was the most this season (four seconds longer than against the Los Angeles Kings last week).”

“We just didn’t spend enough time in their zone, creating presence and pressure,” said Hitchcock.

“You can talk about not scoring goals (season) but it’s zone time. Dallas is a really good team and they don’t let you spend a lot of time in their end if you can’t hold the puck and protect it,” he said.

Having McDavid in the lineup would have helped remedy that, of course.

“We had a lot of good players … I thought JJ (Khaira, first goal of the year) was really good, I thought Rattie and Puljujarvi gave us good minutes, and lots who weren’t good,” said Hitchcock. “To me, we were either above or below the bar with players, nothing in between.”

Ken Hitchcock has had a good glimpse at what ails his new team, what works and what doesn’t early in his tenure behind the Edmonton Oilers bench.

With other teams who had gone through a ‘rebuild’ phase at the same time as these Oilers finally realizing success — like the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Buffalo Sabres — is there anything Hitchcock, the third-winningest coach in NHL history, can do to jumpstart flailing Edmonton?

Podcast host Craig Ellingson talks to Oilers beat writer Rob Tychkowski about Hitchcock and the work the head coach done over the past week while on a three-game road trip to California.

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